Category: LETTERS Page 58 of 274

To Otto Kyllmann
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 7, 1935

At last yesterday I sent off the MS of The Last Puritan which I hope you will receive safely. . . . We have tried to polish it and make it as inoffensive as possible, without weakening the picturesque or the moral burden of it: but it has to be “burdened”; “burdened” was a favourite word with my old teacher Josiah Royce at Harvard: it signified all the inescapable oppression, nervous and imaginative, from which he and his people suffered. Cory thinks that the last part of the book is “inevitable”, and has dramatic interest. I see myself that it reads more like other novels than does the body of the story, but I haven’t attempted to practice “the art of fiction” according to Percy Lubbock or any other critic, but to write a documentary biography of an imaginary superior American, as it might be if distilled into its quintessence and expressed with complete frankness.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. April 6, 1930

Dear Kallen,

Your publishers, no doubt at your request, have sent me your “Indecency and the Seven Arts”, which I have been reading with a good deal of pleasure and amusement. It happens that I had just finished “Humanism and America”, so that I could particularly relish your onslaught on the prigs. Sometimes my pleasure in reading you is modified by a qualm of conscience, when I wonder if the example of my early writings could have encouraged you in your intellectual impressionism. It is an inevitable method up to a certain point, since in one sense all our ideas and convictions must have been once intellectual impressions— notions that simply occurred to one; yet there are degrees in the lightness with which we may pick up these views, and propose them as serious representations of the true relations of things. Perhaps I have become too systematic and too much disinclined to take up fresh notions; it is a hardness proper to old age; but it seems to me that you are not systematic enough, or at least not conscious enough of your latent system, and that your contentions would carry more weight if the reader were told clearly on what principles they rested. Mere inspection of the alleged facts leaves accidental impressions: one is conscious that almost anything else might have been said instead. For instance, you blame Mussolini for the absence of fresh art in Italy; but you say elsewhere that it takes ages for a society to reach genuine expression in the arts; and you might have said—unless your undisclosed first principles forbid it—that a disciplined society, that has admirable and definite artistic traditions, will naturally continue them automatically, as it will continue to speak its old language, and will positively discourage innovations. There is always variation enough imposed by circumstances: new beginnings in the arts are signs either of a previous total ruin or of fashionable impudence. Modern “art” is a matter of one foolish fashion after another. Why have any “art”? What you say about Russia interested me especially: there you feel more at home; and although I know nothing about what is actually brewing there, or what we may hope for, I think it is a splendid experiment. Lenin is as good as Lycurgus or Pythagoras. Let him have his way! Hurrah for a Russian ballet without religion!

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Seville, Spain. April 5, 1914

You are very generous to wish to return to the absolute financial monarchy which you have practically always exercised at the apartment, and I am glad of it, as a sign that the villa hasn’t yet ruined you, and that the fall in American stocks has left you calm like a Stoic. It hasn’t affected me either in practice, and I am still saving money; but on paper it has swallowed up 12% of my capital, so that I feel poor, although I have just as much to spend as before.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. London
Cambridge, England. April 4, 1915

It is ages since I got your last letter, but as we both seem to be caught by the war, like flies in fly-paper, there seemed to be no probable change to report in the situation. I hope you and Margaret are enjoying the Spring in your new garden, and that the Germans won’t come to bombard Florence from your terrace. As for me, I have been doing nothing in particular except read, write, and walk, without much idea of getting any- where by any of the three operations. The war is a daily, and now monotonous, obsession. Sometimes I feel angry with all concerned and think—“It serves you right; do go on shelling and torpedoing one another, until there is nobody left! Good riddance!” The military I see here— Cambridge is full of troops—rather stir my feelings of martial sympathy, and I wish them immense victories, without in the least believing that they will achieve them. But then I read some interview by that ponderous ass Lord Haldane, and I think a country that can have such a humbug for Lord Chancellor ought to be torpedoed as a whole, and sunk like Atlantis in the Channel. As you may imagine, my sentiments about the Germans are even more ferocious; but as I naturally hate the Germans and love the English, the case for Germany is what I try to represent to myself by day and by night.—I suppose you have seen my pro-German (if subtly insidious) article in the Whited Sepulchre.

I have given up all thoughts of leaving England for the present, and rather expect to take some small flat in London for the summer, so as to satisfy my taste for crowds, for sitting in the park, and for eating in Italian restaurants. Let me know if you are really venturing to cross France—and the Channel!—in spite of the War-Lord-War-Zone. Must you go to America this Summer? After your prolonged stay there last year I should think you might skip it; why not go to Switzerland, to some German-speaking place, in lieu of the visit to Germany which you had planned before the Catastrophe?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles P. Davis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 3, 1936

I didn’t send you my novel because I felt that you wouldn’t like it. It’s not Catholic enough—really quite pagan and desolating in its background—and then the moral problem for poor Oliver is quite different from what I expect troubled you when you were young. Your difficulties were plain human difficulties and choices between clear-cut contrasted whereas Oliver is a born (and bred) transcendentalist, thinks always from the pure ego outwards, and never can get outwards very far. Then his feelings and passions are mixed up horribly, and helpless: I was going to say “impotent”, but that would be misleading, because he was far from impotent physically, only emotionally and morally inhibited, and without the courage of his inclinations. He was too tied up ever to find out clearly what these inclinations were. That was why he petered out. Meantime he behaved very well, was loyal and generous (as all my American friends have been) and had a great many noble thoughts: but even his thoughts didn’t cohere into anything specific. . . . Perhaps there are other incidental things in the book that rub you the wrong way, or leave you cold. But I assure you that the texture of the book is good, and that you would like it if you weren’t expecting something else. It certainly is remarkable how people have taken to it in America. I suppose in part it is curiousity to see how “high-brow” experience expresses itself: but in part it must be that they, or some of them, see the fun in the book, and are really entertained.

It isn’t a professional novel, with the events arranged to make a story. It is just a rambling biography, tossed along from one incomplete situation to another, as in real life. I meant it to be that. The world is not a tragedy or a comedy: it is a flux.

I am thinking of going to Paris in the summer . . . unless there is a war. But I think not. The talkers will continue to talk and the doers to do, and we outsiders will be allowed to look on and amuse ourselves.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.